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Cairo practitioner >>Natacha Atlas on the state of Arabic pop
by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
"The stuff that I do reflects a little bit of shaabi," says Natacha Atlas between giggles and mouthfuls of food, at a music festival in France where she's performing. Once of London's multi-culti clubpoppers Transglobal Underground, Atlas has more recently spun off on a solo course, exploring her Egyptian heritage and presenting it in a modern danceclub context. Some insights, please, Natacha. "I think you need to go listen to Hakim," she says, "and someone like Hamid Chery. Because Chery represents the more refined pop music, for the nouveau-riche, bourgeois kids, in Egypt and all the Middle East, who like to go out and look American and trendy. It's very superficial. Shaabi is a little more street, even working class. It's kind of like blues, a bit more traditional in the sense that they use the old Arabic scales. Not in a sophisticated way, but the songs are more immediate, rougher and rawer. But both styles influenced my last album, Gedida." And what about crossover between Arabic countries? Atlas notes that Morocco and Lebanon have the market cornered on cool these days. "But as it happens there, so then will it filter through. Egypt will probably be the last on the list, though, because it's actually a rather conservative market, a bit behind and old hat. They used to have the dominion of the cultural and artistic field in the Arabic world, especially in the '50s and '60s. They had a superiority complex for a long time, and they still have it. I don't know why, because they haven't anything that special in a long time." That may change, as Atlas plans to record her next album entirely in Egypt. "There's a producer out there, one of my best friends, who's working with some of the new shaabi artists. We'll be working together, along with the guys from Transglobal. We'll see what happens."
At the Spectrum on Saturday, July 3, 9pm, $25.50 |
Here in Quebec, most of what we hear in the way of current Arabic pop music is raï, from French-speaking Morocco and Algeria. It's hard to tell what's going on in the rest of the Middle East--for instance, the Egyptian shaabi sound.